Two things in the last month worked towards my goal. One was the mini-makeover of our living room that included decluttering the over-full bookshelves on either side of the fireplace. I counted numbers .36 to .72 here, mainly in books, but actually could’ve counted more if I counted all the magazines in a stack I had kept since the 1980s (!).

I am not the type of person who normally keeps old magazines, but this magazine was Do It Yourself and back in the 90’s I seriously got a ton of frugal ideas for fixing up and remodeling our first house and yard. I’ve looked through them numbers of times, so I always thought they were good to keep.

Until I realized how out-dated some of the styles were (understatement). And in the last five years the magazine has become less and less of “do it yourself” and more of “I hired so and so to do what I planned.” Worse, if someone did do something themselves, they usually were a contractor, builder, or decorator who just happened to be doing their own houses.

Um, sorry, not too realistic for us regular folk.

Needless to say, time to toss ’em!

The other thing that motivated us to get rid of things was a garage sale that our son’s youth group was having. More books, numbers .73 to .96 came out of The Writer’s office. We really do have quite a few books and they were threatening to take over.

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As far as acquiring new items, if you purchase a new book for example, read it and decide to get rid of it instead of keep it then I would say it should count! (However if you are given a huge box of books & don’t read any they shouldn’t count!!) In my challenge, I’m not counting hand-me-downs as me getting rid of clutter…I am just passing on someone else’s unwanted stuff, it’s not helping my home out!!

Sounds like great progress. Make your own rules. It’s unlikely that any of us will not bring anything new into our homes, so I’m not worrying about those items. Just marking the stuff that goes out. I got a couple of gifts in January that were in my February “out” pile. I counted them.